Colin Jacobsen &

Siamak Aghaei

Program Note Written by Christine Wisch

 

In 2004, composer and violinist Colin Jacobsen (b. 1978) visited Iran, where he connected with two musicians, Siamak Aghaei and Kayhan Kalhor, whom he had met earlier through collaborations through the Silk Road Project (now known as Silkroad), a musical arts organization founded by Yo-Yo Ma that promotes cultural exchange.  In addition to being a virtuoso performer of the santur, a Persian hammered dulcimer, Aghaei also collects field recordings of traditional melodies across Iran.  During Jacobsen’s stay in Iran, Aghaei shared a recording of a tiny instrument made from the bones of a bird and whose music captured the story of mythological bird who tries flying to the sun.  Finding inspiration in this recording, Jacobsen worked with Aghaei to create Ascending Bird (2004), a work of increasing tempo and excitement that combines inflections of Persian folk song and practice with traditional Western instruments.  The work exists in a variety of arrangements made by Jacobsen and received its premiere in 2013 by the Silk Road Ensemble.

 

Felix Mendelssohn

Incidental Music

Program Note Written by Bill Hemminger

 

Along with Mozart and Camille Saint Saëns, Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47) was one of the great musical prodigies in western music.  Born into a wealthy and very cultured Berlin family, Mendelssohn received highest quality musical training—which he put to grant advantage—as well as a superior academic education.  Like his sisters, Felix studied a number of languages as well as the literature associated with those languages.  Through a popular (at the time) translation of the works of Shakespeare, Mendelssohn grew up reading the Bard, and he and his sisters acted out scenes of favorite plays.  The fairies, elves, hobgoblins, and magic potions of Midsummer Night’s Dream were favorites of the Mendelssohn children.

 

Mendelssohn was a precocious 17 when he wrote the Overture to Shakespeare’s comedy.  The much-performed piece is a real tour de force.  It begins with four chords that hang suspended in the air.   Then the strings begin to move fast and furtively (in the relative minor key) as the fairies are depicted “on the move.”  A more lyrical theme follows, evoking the lovers (of which there are several sets in Midsummer Night’s Dream).  Also part of Shakespeare’s rollicking comedy are the townspeople, tradesmen who, in the language of the time, were known as Mechanicals.  In Act III, one of the Mechanicals, Bottom, is transformed into a donkey, and Mendelssohn scores his recurrent braying for orchestral instruments as part of the Overture.  The piece then returns to the fleet string passages suggestive of the fairies and finally to the mystical slow chords that opened the work.

 

Sixteen years later Mendelssohn felt inspired to write music for the entire play, thus the additional incidental music (with musical references to the Overture) that you are hearing today. The work was first performed in 1843.

 

In Mendelssohn’s musical envisioning of the play, the Overture precedes Act I.  The setting is a timeless, magical Athens, Greece.  The play opens as a nobleman, Theseus, plans festivities for his upcoming marriage to Hippolyta.  Young, patrician lovers are introduced next:  Lysander, whom Hermia would like to marry, and Demetrius, whom Hermia’s father has decided she WILL marry.  Forlorn Helena also appears; she loves Demetrius, but, sadly, he is “taken.”  As the act concludes, Lysander and Hermia plan to elope, leaving citified Athens for the openness of the country. 

 

The Scherzo follows Act I and leads to the first Melodrama, with words spoken over the music.  In service to Queen Titania, a fairy announces:  “Over hill, over dale,  / Thorough bush, thorough brier. . . / I do wander everywhere” to do the bidding of her spirit mistress.  Meanwhile, hobgoblin Puck states that “I am that merry wanderer of the night,” the one whose stock in trade is creating mischief with the aid of magic and dissembling. 

 

The March of the Fairies (Act II, scene i) accompanies the arrival of Oberon, king of the fairies, and Titania, his wife and queen.  Even the immortal fairies suffer from the vagaries of physical love as Titania’s attentions are divided between love for her husband and for a young Indian boy whom she “possesses.”  Not a little jealous of his wife’s infatuation, Oberon has enlisted the aid of Puck to gather nectar from a magic plant (since this is the spirit-inhabited country), which, when applied to the eye of a dormant lover, will cause the sleeper to fall in love with the first person that appears as eyes open from the dark night of slumber.  Puck responds:  “Fear not, my lord.  Your servant so shall do,” and Oberon will acquire the potion that he needs to work his will. 

 

The first of the two songs announces Act II ii, when Titania is welcomed to stage by the singing of the fairies.  The words of the song, “You spotted snakes, with double tongue” ward off malignant night forces as the fairies bid Titania good night.  Later, with Tatiana asleep, Oberon anoints her eyes while whispering: “What thou seest when thou dost wake / Do it for thy true love take,” hoping that he might be that waking apparition. Meanwhile, the star-crossed young lovers fall asleep, and, misconstruing his orders, Puck sneaks up to Lysander to apply nectar to his closed lids.

 

A second Intermezzo occurs at the conclusion of Act II.  As Act III opens, a simple march presents the goofy Mechanicals, who have decided that they will perform a play, Pyramus and Thisbe, as wedding gift to Theseus and the others.  Puck enters, unseen, and mocks the amateur assemblage as they rehearse their lines: “What hempen homespuns have we swagg’ring here?” he mocks.  He wickedly decides to throw a wrench into the dramatic presentation by transforming Bottom’s head into that of an ass, surely an inappropriate mask for the tragic main character Pyramus.  It is this creature, though, whose eyes Titania light upon as she awakens; and thus is she besotted by an ass.  Meanwhile, through Puck’s intervention, Lysander awakens and falls for Helena, Demetrius too, and poor Hermia is left with no lover at all.  Impressed with how easily he can manage mortals, Puck notes with derision—“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”—but then willingly works to undo the spells.  By the Act’s end, Hermia has returned to Lysander and now Demetrius loves Helena.  Puck congratulates himself for putting the love matches to rights, singing that “Jack shall have Jill; / Naught shall go ill; / The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.”

 

The elegiac Nocturne becomes a musical bridge between Act III and Act IV.  The sonorous music—the scoring for horns and bassoons is particularly beautiful—accompanies the enchanted lovers as they sleep.  It isn’t until Act IV i that Oberon himself will “release the Fairy Queen” from her bemused repose.  The music of the Nocturne then returns as Titania awakens and exclaims “What visions have I seen!”  Throughout Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare plays with the notion of vision—what is real, what apparent?—as he does with the mysteries of dark, night, and sleep (which elsewhere he describes as a “taste of death”).  The act concludes as Theseus and his train arrive—it is May Day—only to find the young lovers, now properly betrothed, asleep. Theseus imagines that they came to the country “early to observe / The rite of May, and hearing our intent, / Came here in grace of our solemnity.”  Then Theseus commands that horns be blown, a reveille for all present.

 

The famous Wedding March follows Act IV; it is a sumptuous state affair.  Much of this composition’s fame stems from its having been a favorite of Queen Victoria of England.  As the play reaches its conclusion there are three couples to be wed—Theseus and Hippolyta, Lysander and Hermia, Helena and Demetrius. 

 

The fifth and final act opens with Theseus’ comment that “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” suffer from “seething brains” that may concoct and believe in visions, some of which may well be false.  By now in the play, though, it is time for the performance of the Mechanicals’ play, a tragedy in which both Pyramus and Thisbe, lovers kept apart and able only to communicate through a Wall (one of the characters in their play, an unspoken part unsurprisingly), die unrequited.  The Mechanicals’ performance, however, has been so botched, its message so contorted, that even the Funeral March for the main characters becomes a source of light-hearted derision for the sophisticated Athenian audience—despite the grim ending of the fabled lovers’ lives. 

 

The day grows late, and the players and the wedding couples take their leave as the Wedding March is reprised.  Puck welcomes the coming of night, when “the hungry lion roars  / And the wolf behowls the moon,”  while Oberon and Titania lead their otherworldly minions indoors.  Oberon enjoins the fairies to “give glimmering light,” the second song in the play, to the darkening house while they “will sing and bless this place.”  It is the hobgoblin Puck who has the final words of the play:  “If we shadows have offended/ Think but this and all is mended: / That you have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear.”   The four bewitching chords of the Overture recur; the end thus becomes the beginning; and audiences are left to wonder if the actors who have disappeared (like spirits?) into the depths of the theater are or were ever real.